Artist Statement

Pottery

I strive to make pottery that carries with it a sense of energy and life that can only be enhanced when used for the presentation of food and flowers. Most pieces are slip cast and then often altered, added on to, or reconstructed in some way. I use a mid-range white casting slip.

I have made many different types of pottery over my career, but have always been interested in the way decorative elements can be used to enhance a form, whether one is using an elaborate pattern or the simplest marks. The decorative elements of my work are influenced by the natural world. I was brought up to always notice and take joy in nature.

I have lived my whole life in a rural environment. My images are usually of grasses, leaves, flowers, and nowadays birds. I grew into the bird imagery years after my father, a well known landscape and bird painter passed away.

I have always been attracted to certain qualities of the decorative arts in Asia. I attribute this to living next door to the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City while in Art School there. More recently two long working sojourns in China, which gave me abundant access to seeing Yuan and Han Dynasty ritualistic forms, influenced the sculptural aspects of my pieces. My glazing method is the use of multiple layers of compatible glazes, using wax resist and liquid latex to create a kind of visual depth.

Sculpture

My work has been centered for years around the metaphor of the women as the spiritual container of life and my women are often depicted with a vessel of some kind in order to emphasize that allusion to containment. They are intended to be archetypal rather than portraiture and to emote a sense of the universal. My desire is to fill the pieces with life and energy that connects them to the natural world. I vacillate between portraying a sense of calm and meditative acceptance, with the a sense of precariousness and fragility, both of which are part of the natural order of things. My interest is in portraying the essence of a woman; her capacity symbolically and in the flesh, to give life, to nurture, and exhibit both vulnerability, beauty and strength.